AccuWeather Removes Reveal Mobile SDK from its iOS App

AccuWeather has announced that the Reveal Mobile SDK has been removed from its iOS app due to privacy concerns brought to the company’s attention by many of the app’s users. Earlier this week, security researcher Will Strafach published an article on Medium that warns users the AccuWeather iOS app sends location information such as GPS coordinates and Wi-Fi router name to Reveal Mobile. Many users posted on Twitter that they would no longer use the AccuWeather app due to the location-based data sharing behavior. The company has just released version 10.5.3 of the AccuWeather app for iOS which removes the Reveal Mobile SDK.

"AccuWeather's app employed a Software Development Kit (SDK) from a third-party vendor (Reveal Mobile) that inadvertently allowed Wi-Fi router data to be transmitted to this third-party vendor," the company states in its announcement. "Once we became aware of this situation we took immediate action to verify the operation and quickly disabled the SDK from the IOS app. Our next step was to update the IOS app and remove Reveal Mobile completely."

The company has provided an additional statement within the AccuWeather app version 10.5.3 update notes on the iTunes website. The company states in the notes that "This update removes an SDK from a third-party vendor because it may have inadvertently transmitted data after users had opted-out of location services. We were unaware of this possibility and the vendor assures us that at no time was this data used by the vendor. At no time did AccuWeather access the data."

Read the full announcement on the AccuWeather site, or visit the iTunes site to read the version 10.5.3 updates notes in full.

About the author:Janet Wagner
is a technical writer and contributor to ProgrammableWeb who covers breaking news and in-depth analysis. She specializes in creating well-researched, in-depth content about APIs, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, analytics, and other advanced technologies.